So after having to fork over some cash for car repairs, one month after the thing was paid off of course, I decided it was time to look at PhillyCarShare.  I own a car, and it works fine, but some how I just know the car gods are going to get pissed at some point and something will happen so my wife and I won’t have a car to drive.  It made sense to have a back up plan, and the whole deal is actually pretty sweet.  Instead of buying a car or renting one, you pay per use, and their is no annual membership fee or joining fee. Plus they have cool cars that i have been wanting to drive, I see it as a Win Win really.

PhillyCarShare

I just realized that I have been putting this off for way to long, and I haven’t posted in over 6 months.  The main reason for this is due to the fact that I have been considering renaming or moving this blog, primarily due to the fact that i am no longer a music librarian, and am now a Web Development Librarian for the same organization.  Why the change you ask?  Well, I enjoy developing and coding, and this to me is a natural move.  I still plan on posting on music resources and sites, but i will also begin to develop and post projects and pieces of things I am working on.

And for a final note….you gotta love a cool t-shirt.

Check these out.

Banjo Hero

This was found via Digital Alchemy. I did an earlier post regarding Free Music Websites almost a year ago. Several of these are new to me.

Taken directly from Digital Alchemy.

1. We7: Free downloads with a 10 second advertisement inserted at the beginning of every track. Restrictions: None. Review.

2. Lala: Listen to unlimited free music on-demand. Restrictions: None. Review. Dead for now.

3. SpiralFrog: Free, ad-supported music downloads. Restrictions: DRM, Canada-only.

4. Ruckus: Free unlimited music downloads. 2.5 million tracks in library. Restrictions: DRM, college students only.

5. Slacker: Play music on-demand along with music recommendations. Restrictions: None. Review.

6. Pandora: Streaming music recommendation service. Restrictions: US only, not on-demand.

7. Last.fm: Streaming music recommendation service. Restrictions: Not on-demand.

8. eMusic: Limited to 25 MP3 downloads during free trial period. 2 million song library. Restrictions: Limited downloads.

9. Qtrax: Unlimited downloads and song plays with contextual ads. P2P-based client forthcoming. Restrictions: DRM(?).

10. Playble: A free music download service from The Pirate Bay. Forthcoming. Restrictions: None. Review.

11. Broadclip: Like TiVo for Internet radio stations. Schedule recordings of your favorite music and download them later as MP3s. Free software download required. Restrictions: None.

12. iLike: Discover new music through your friends. Share your music library. Download free MP3s of new artists. Restrictions: None.

13. MyStrands: Downloadable application to tag, share, manage, and discover new music. Restrictions: None.

14. iJigg: Digg for music. Rate, stream, and download free music. Restrictions: None.

15. SoundPedia: Listen to free streaming music. Create and share playlists. Restrictions: None.

16. Haystack: Social network for sharing and discovering new music. Restrictions: None.

17. Deezer: Free streaming online music. On-demand. Formerly called BlogMusik. Restrictions: None. Review.

The October 2007 issue of Electronic Musician recently ran a feature on online recording collaboration Services in an article titled, “The World is your Work Station” by Marty Cutler. Collaboration utilities have been popping up left and right via wikis, and other Web 2.0 projects, but this is the first I’ve heard of this trend moving into recording methods. Most of these services run off the premise that you yourself have recording capabilities at home, or have access to a recording studio. In the article the author examines several different services available for the recording musician that enable them to collaborate with others and share files. These are the services that were examined in the article.

digitalmusician.net :

• Membership: Free, and Pro-membership fee from about $13.50
• Online Storage: YES
• Session Communication: Audiovisual chat via dmr, dml, and dmm
• Optional Open Collaboration: YES

eJamming

• Membership: Free during beta, 9.95 per month
• Online Storage: no
• Session Communication: chat via eJamming audio
• Optional Open Collaboration: YES

eSession

• Membership: FREE
• Online Storage: 250 MB Free to 150 GIG paid
• Session Communication:Chat and blogging through song page, audiovisial chat via Virtual Glass software
• Optional Open Collaboration: no

Indaba Music >

• Membership:Free, or Pro-membership $10 month
• Online Storage: 250 Mb free; Pro: 10 Gig
• Session Communication: messaging and blogging
• Optional Open Collaboration: yes

i-Studio.net

• Membership: n/a
• Online Storage: yes
• Session Communication: no
• Optional Open Collaboration: no

Session Players

• Membership:$25 a year
• Online Storage: yes
• Session Communication: Audiovisual chat via dmr, dml software
• Optional Open Collaboration: no

Another music suggestion website filled with reviews and links to purchase music, Critical Metrics is different in that it is filled with music that critics are writing about. There are several of these out there, and many offer the same features in different packages, but this is the first I know of to list music that critics review favorably. You can stream the audio and purchase it from all of the top vendors, and each track features a quote from the reviewing publication with a static url for each song. You can sort in several ways, including Date, Review Source, and service that the material is available on, and you can search by title or artist.

Here’s some info from their website.

“Every week, artists, DJs, music tv networks, newspapers, magazines, retailers, and bloggers recommend hundreds of their favorite new songs. Critical Metrics keeps track of recommendations and playlists across all media so you can easily find, try, and buy the best new music. Critical Metrics is free. “

On Sorting:

“Critical Metrics filters all strong recommendations (eg. all reviews ranked four stars or greater) during the selected time period, displaying the most recent, the most widely recommended, and the highest-rated results first. “

I haven’t had the chance to write for quite awhile since I have been swamped at work, but I’ve made a list of things to write about over the past 3 months and this was at the top of the list. Musotik is music information site. That’s pretty much it. It’s still in Beta, and the developer has pointed out that many of the things they would like to work simply aren’t right now, but this site has potential. Type in an artist’s name and hopefully you’ll get a hit. If so, you are then provided with tabs of information on an artist including bio, events, news, pictures and torrents. Links on where to check them out are provided for you on the left from the following services; LastFM, Pandora, SonicX, Youtube, and MusicBrainz. Related artists appear underneath the link to music services. On the bottom of thepage are links to YoutTube videos on the artist you’ve searched for.

What I like about Musotik is that it brings all of this information from several different sources and puts it in one place. Album art, YouTube videos, track listings, artist information, pics, all in one place. There are definitely bugs. I tried several artists, from several styles, and for the most part there was information on each artist. I found it hard to believe that there was no bio information on the Beatles though. No where it gets iffy is in the songs. Artist’s albums are listed and each album lists the individual tracks. By clicking on on a track, you can either listen to, or download the song. There is an advisory informing the user that Musotik does not host the songs and that downloading them could be illegal. I’m interested to see what happens, but this may get them into trouble.

All in all, this has the potential to develop into a very fun and useful tool.

The social software tool del.icio.us is something that libraries everywhere should embrace. We’ve started to use it in the various subject departments where I work, and it has given us the ability to categorize web tools that we deem as useful.

Here is a link for the Music Department’s del.icio.us page,

http://del.icio.us/freelibrarymusic

Each department can be viewed by selecting the otherlibrarydepartments tag. We’ve definitely added quite a number of bookmarks for our department, and have split them into several categories; Classical Music, Copyright, Jazz, Music Reference, Record Industry, Sheet Music, & Web 2.0. Almost every link has a citation or paragraph describing the website and its usefulness, and I hope to add a description for every website and clean up all of the tags relatively soon.

New web based service, Midomi claims be able to name that tune. With the use of a microphone, you can hum part of a song, or make an attempt at the lyrics, and midomi will record your version and figure out the name of the song you are looking for. You can listen to people’s attempts at singing the song, or preview a few seconds of the original version. Midomi also provides a link to purchase the track, if you find the right song.

This would have been the perfect tool for me back when I worked at a record store in college. I think that one could have a good time just listening to other people trying to sing their favorite pop hits. In terms of usefulness, it seems to work pretty well, though I don’t know how extensive of a catalog they can support. For current pop hits I think they would fare pretty well….for the rare stuff I’m interested to see how they do.

This was taken from their website.

midomi.com makes it fun and easy to find and discover music and people. For the first time, you can use your voice to instantly connect to your favorite music, and to a community of people that share your musical interests. Listen to voices, see pictures, rate singers, send messages, buy music, and more.

Found via lifehacker , ghack has posted a list of free sites to find music. For those of us you who like to avoid the recording industry and are looking for new sounds to explore this list is fairly extensive and lets you know which site offers downloads, streaming audio, and other little bits of information. Here is a link to the article, FREE MUSIC WEBSITES .

And the list;

New website MUS OPEN offers legal downloads of public domain works recorded by college and community orchestras. These works are made available for download and can be searched or browsed. This is very interesting as it may work to offer downloads of materials that can be hard to find recordings of. Aaron Dunn was a music and economics student who created the website as a project for college.